In recent years, the availability and provision of text documents, multimedia, and entertainment content has increased substantially. For example, the number of available television and radio channels has grown considerably and the popularity of the Internet has provided new content distribution means. Also, the Internet has provided the average user with a seemingly endless source of text documents in the forms of web pages, blogs, online text documents etc.
It has furthermore become of interest to provide additional associated content that relates to the content which is consumed by a user. Such associated content may for example be adverts, such as an advert inserted in a television program or added to a web page. In order to provide associated content which is of particular interest to the individual user, it is desirable that such content is specifically adapted to the individual user's preference profile and to the specific content that the user is currently accessing. In particular, it has been proposed that adverts are specifically adapted to the content being consumed and to the content consumption preferences of the individual user. For example, when a user accesses a web page, it is desirable for any associated adverts to reflect the user's preferences and the characteristics of the specific web page.
Such targeting and personalization of associated content can be achieved by selecting the associated content from a content library such that it matches the selected content. For example, when a user selects a specific content item, such as a webpage or a music clip, on a device, the device may access a local or remote content store to retrieve an associated content item that matches the content item.
Such associated content selection and provision is becoming increasingly important. For example, advertising is a key method of generating revenue from online applications and services. Increasingly content, search, and other web applications, as well as network services and even user devices, are likely to be heavily subsidized by revenue collected from advertising. Targeting of advertisements based on user context and preferences has been demonstrated to increase/improve the user response to adverts.
For example, the business model for web search sites is heavily based on advertising. In this case, search queries are matched to keywords for adverts in an advertisement repository and matching adverts are selected to be presented to the user. An extension of this technique has been applied to insertion of adverts in web pages, where the adverts are selected based on the occurrence of advert keywords in the web page.
However, such selection of adverts has been found to be suboptimal in many scenarios. For example, it has been demonstrated in B. Ribeiro-Neto, M. Cristo, P. B. Golgher, E. Silva de Moura, “Impedance Coupling in Content-targeted Advertising”, Proceedings SIGIR '05, Aug. 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil that there tends to be a vocabulary mismatch between web pages and adverts. It has been suggested that selection of adverts can be improved by taking into account supplementary information, such as information of the web pages that have hyperlinks to the advert. Another proposed approach is to first perform a web search based on terms derived from the original web page. Further terms are extracted from the web pages provided by the search and these additional terms are then used when selecting adverts. However, although such an approach may improve the matching of adverts to user content, it tends to be best suited to server-based matching where a large repository of web pages may be cached to assist in the matching process. Indeed, the approach tends to be less suited to resource constrained devices, such as mobile phones or set-top boxes. Indeed, the approach will require substantial computational and storage resources and/or will tend to be slow and impractical. For example, for a mobile phone to repeatedly perform searches using a standard online web search tool will result in a very slow process. Furthermore, the communication and resource requirement for retrieving and processing the search results tend to be excessive for portable devices.
Furthermore, existing approaches tend to result in suboptimal selection of associated content, and it is desirable to provide an improved accuracy of the matching of the associated content to the individual user and consumed content.
Also, in some systems it may be desirable to provide locally stored associated content together with content received from a remote server. For example, a content service provider may wish to offer cheaper (or free) content services in return for the user accepting adverts being presented. These adverts may be locally cached on the user's device with the device autonomously selecting appropriate adverts from those locally cached. Such an approach may provide a number of advantages including for example reducing the loading and requirements for the remote server and allowing the user to have a single profile that can be used with a plurality of different online applications and services. However, it requires the associated content matching to be performed on the user device itself thereby requiring an approach that is suitable for resource constrained devices.
Hence, an improved approach for selecting associated content items would be advantageous and in particular a system allowing increased flexibility, improved content item selection, reduced resource usage, improved suitability for resource constrained devices, facilitated implementation and/or improved performance would be advantageous.